If “women’s empowerment” led to sex-selective abortion, that would offer a powerful argument against abortion since everyone agrees sex-selective abortion is bad. The problem is that even abortion rights supporters think sex-selective abortion is bad, and the reason is because sex-selective abortion is obviously reflective of coercion by culture if not the state. Despite having elected female heads of state, Indian culture retains many patriarchal elements, chief among them the fact that having female children is really expensive because parents are expected to pay the families of their daughters’ husbands elaborate dowries.

…

Perhaps it seems obvious, but that kind of blatant economic incentive against having female children doesn’t exist in the United States. Does Douthat really believe that’s the result of women being “less empowered” here? Simply making abortion legal doesn’t amount to “women’s empowerment,” especially in a society where women are coerced into ending pregnancies by their husbands or society at large.

I think a clearer version of the sentence that Serwer finds objectionable would have read “increasing female empowerment often seems to have led to more sex selection, not less.” I wasn’t suggesting that women are “less empowered” in the United States than in India or China, or that female empowerment of any sort necessarily leads to sex-selective abortion. My point, based on Hvistendahl’s reporting, is that all good things don’t go together, or at least not at first: As a developing society becomes richer, more technologically advanced and less rigidly patriarchal, there’s a period in which a cultural preference for boys leads women — often beginning with women in the upper classes, not the poor and economically-insecure — to use their newfound freedoms to have many more sons than daughters. The story of sex-selective abortion has something do with the long shadow of patriarchal norms, but it isn’t usually a clear-cut case of women being “coerced into ending pregnancies by their husbands or society at large,” as Serwer puts it. (Hvistendahl notes that cases where husbands pressure their wives to abort account for “only a small portion of Asia’s sex selective abortions,” and marshals examples of women concealing sex-selective abortions from husbands who object.) Instead, the maternal preference for boys seems to be more a problem of what the Marxists would call “false consciousness” than an issue of women lacking the legal freedoms and formal agency that we usually associate with female advancement.

In other words, while there probably exists a point of development at which the bias toward sons dissolves (or at least weakens sufficiently to create a stigma around sex selection), the gradual transition from patriarchy to gender equality creates a long period in which women themselves choose to abort more girls than boys. And if you believe, as Serwer does, that you simply can’t have genuine female empowerment without unrestricted abortion, then there’s nothing to be done except learn to live with this reality, try to hasten the day when Asia becomes Scandinavia, and hope that gender ratios don’t get too skewed along the way.

Let’s pretend for a moment that the only source of the problem really is patriarchy. Well, then, you have two choices: Do you confront the slaughter of millions of girls by “fighting” patriarchal culture in some nebulous way that may, or may not, after several decades, pay off? Or do you outlaw abortion, enforce the ban pretty rigorously (by sending doctors who perform them to jail) and understand that while there will still be illegal abortions which slip through the cracks, girl babies won’t be targeted as widely and that the vast majority of those who would have been killed in the gendercide will be allowed life?

I think I can guess where Serwer would come down. Which is fine. But you must then realize that all the posturing about how terrible it is that girls keep getting aborted is really just a second-order concern. Again, that’s fine. But if that’s what you believe, you should have the courage to say it out loud.

… Last’s right, if you don’t actually care about whether women have the right to make decisions about when they have children, then the “solution” to the problem is rather simple. Liberals would prefer a society in which women have the autonomy to make their own decisions, free of coercion from the state or social custom.

… Where liberals see a problem of prejudice or oppression through culture and custom, conservatives simply see an opportunity to argue that women should be forced to carry children to term.

I think Serwer is basically saying it out loud. (Though he would presumably dispute Last’s description of a female fetus as a “baby girl.”) In his worldview, the right to terminate a pregnancy is a fundamental liberty, like freedom of speech or freedom to worship, and fundamental liberties by definition trump consequentialist arguments about their negative effects. Pro-choice liberals may care (deeply, in many cases) about those negative effects. But their principles come first, and those principles rule out the most direct approach to combating sex-selective abortion in the developing world and permit only very gradual and indirect approaches instead.

This isn’t an unusual situation. Every vision of human liberty requires tolerating certain evils in the name of individual rights, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with erring on the side of freedom, and then trying ameliorate its side effects.

But some evils are more striking than others, and some definitions of liberty more dubious — and the graver the evil you’re tolerating, the more likely that your philosophical premises have gone awry. Which is why the pro-life side is well within its rights to point out that the liberal West’s current vision of human freedom bears responsibility for 160 million (and counting) missing girls.

What's Next

About

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.